Over the last few months, German audiences have witnessed a rare opportunity to explore the work of three significantly different but equally important approaches to contemporary art from China. Ai Weiwei is the subject of an expansive solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, an exhibition that documents a broad swath of his practice up to and including recent political interventions. Just as timely but a bit more cryptic, Qiu Zhijie presents a range of new work at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. And in perhaps the most ambivalent of these presentations, Chu Yun offers his first solo exhibition in some time at the Portikus in Frankfurt. All three projects represent strong showings of artists increasingly well-known for inconsistency in institutional and especially international presence; here, unburdened by the pressures and exigencies of art discourse back home in Beijing and with strong curatorial support, all three artists indicate robust methodologies and future directions for the development of socially engaged creative production.
Ai Weiwei offers perhaps the most predictable exhibition, following directly on the heels of a recent solo survey at the Mori in Tokyo. This project engages more fully with the political nature of the artist and activist’s recent activities within China: entitled So Sorry, it stands as the constructive aftermath of a life-threatening wound inflicted by the police as retribution for Ai Weiwei’s investigation into the Sichuan earthquake. This title refers to a new discourse of political communication that Mr. Ai notices emerging through the media in societies labeled totalitarian to some degree or another–including but certainly not exclusive to China. Within the discourse of “so sorry,” governmental failure is supposedly excused through apology not subject to the burden of responsibility; in terms of the Chinese government, this is symptomatic of a refusal to admit the worth of human life.
The Haus der Kunst was constructed by Hitler to showcase the artistic talents of the human race, a context that Ai Weiwei exploits in order to approach the question of critical reflection and aesthetic excellence under the virtually uninterrupted narrative of state power from imperial China to the present. Most poignantly in this respect, for the work “Remembering” the artist has covered the main facade of the building with 9000 backpacks in solid yellow, red, blue, white, and green, the arrangement of which spells out the Chinese characters for “for seven years she lived happily on this world,” quoting the mother of a young victim of the Sichuan earthquake. The natural disaster will be remembered not only as a tragedy of historic proportions, but also as a turning point in the political outlook of contemporary China. It was the seemingly docile and humanitarian investigation into the disproportionate death rate of children in shoddily constructed school buildings–popularly construed as evidence of widespread corruption–that ultimately lead to arrests, beatings, surveillance, and online censorship.
But Ai Weiwei remains an enigmatic figure in this regard. It is widely known that he contributed to the conceptual design of the Herzog and de Meuron Olympic stadium in Beijing, a piece of monumental architecture that stands as one of the crown jewels of the new regime. Of course he later disavowed his participation when it became clear that the international attention would not improve the political situation behind the buildings, referring to the design as a massive toilet seat. In early August 2008, Zhang Yimou animated that architectural environment with his theatrics for the Olympic opening a ceremony, a spectacle-based scenography that was intensely critiqued for its subversion of performer in favor of image. In a tactic that would later be repeated during the 60th anniversary military parade for the People’s Republic, people became pixels. Cutting-edge digital theory thus collides directly with the powerful population dynamics of urban China.
In Munich Ai Weiwei embraces the same aesthetic. Individual victims of the earthquake, represented by the backpacks hanging across the front of the building, disappear into the vocabulary of dissent. Such are the rhetorical techniques required for the serious discussion of such questions in and around China, especially as the stakes of such debate are elevated to questions of life and death. In truth the figuration of the array recurs even in less explicitly political and spectacular work here, as in the room arranged over the foundation of the piece “Soft Ground,” for which the artist photographed in minute detail 929 floor tiles over 380 square meters before having the images reproduced as carpeting at a mill in Hebei. The trompe-l’œil methodology is pedestrian, but the implication of Chinese labor provides an interesting foil to the 70 years of historical and curatorial activity that left its traces over the totalitarian architectural foundations. Nevertheless, it remains a two-dimensional attempt.
Then there is the installation “Rooted Upon,” forming a linguistic diptych with the carpeting upon which it rests. Again falling under the rubric of the array, the piece consists of 100 dead trees in seemingly molded wooden forms vaguely resembling Taihu scholar rocks. According to Ai Weiwei, this sculptural set should recall a sense of growing out of the floor in a metaphorical dialogue with history to engage with the concept of art as the ultimate dictatorship–a rather perplexing explanation indeed. Potentially more interesting is the physical and grammatical relationship between these pieces of wood, clearly acting as the materiality of historical processes, and the carpet, which stands in for the anonymity of ahistorical labor: form itself, or the power that emerges from aesthetics, may indeed be “rooted upon soft ground.”
The walls claustrophobically surrounding these two intriguing installations on all four sides are plastered with “Fairytale People,” individual photographic portraits in black and white of each of the 1001 Chinese visitors to Kassel Ai Weiwei included for his sprawling Documenta project. The massive numbers of discrete elements again recall pixels on an empty monitor, forming a productive dialogue with the nameless laborers embedded within the carpet and the sense of history implied by the wooden formtions. It is difficult to determine what makes the Documenta project compelling and precisely which aspects were destined for failure, but in this particular context the portraits seem to claim a purely visual interest in their own right. Perhaps excessively, the exhibition also includes “Template,” the massive timber temple sculpture that collapsed during Documenta, and reconstructions of visitor living quarters designed by the artist, including a bed and an old-fashioned chair: nothing but the bare physical and cultural necessities for these pixels.
In another gallery Ai Weiwei has installed the new work “Cube in Ebony,” one cubic meter of solid rosewood completed through the technical perfection of traditional craftwork pushed to the extremes of industrial production. Much of this time-intensive work is actually produced through the methodology of relational production by craftsmen who the artist implicates in an almost feudal relationship of patronage: some are employed directly by Ai Weiwei’s own studio, while others remain a phone call away in their own manufacturing settings. Results are similar, as the artist oversees their work voraciously, ensuring that cubes like this one are planed and sanded to mathematical near perfection. The sculpture is here paired with “Ton of Tea,” a cube of equal dimensions composed of compressed tea that aesthetically far exceeds the house of tea shown in the artist’s last exhibition. The visual rhyme is impressive, ultimately shifting the reading of these two works from the concept of sheer materiality back to the labor of production and bringing them back into conversation with “Soft Ground.” But where the latter is produced by anonymous factory workers (however advanced their craft), these cubes are emphatically the work of the hand–and not too many pairs of hands at that.
The exhibition also includes the usual Ai Weiwei standbys: neolithic vases dipped in industrial paint, archival videos of walks along Beijing’s major arteries, chandelier-like sculpture, wooden maps of China, repurposed ancient furniture, and so on. But perhaps most productively, the Haus der Kunst has invited the artist to reopen his blog on their website–an aggressive move to make at a time when his major domestic blog had just been shut down for the latest but certainly not last time. The blog (http://aiweiwei.blog.hausderkunst.de) appears to be run on a relatively open basis, with multiple posts from Ai Weiwei himself, curator Chris Dercon, the exhibition team, and other individuals withs some relationship to the venue. All of this textual material carries on the spirit if not the word of the artist’s previous escapades in the digital realm, inviting impassioned debate and vehement criticism while giving voice to multilingual demands for justice, freedom, or at least critical thinking.
It is gratifying to note that Ai Weiwei’s explicitly activist activities, including the blog, are finally beginning to be recognized as artistic interventions in their own right, but one major hurdle remains: critical understanding of his comprehensive practice must expand to include the possibility of statistical and epistimological methods, including the cataloguing of earthquake victims and resistance to internet censorship, as art. If installations like “Remembering” and the dragon made of backpacks presented in Tokyo are no longer required to stand in as pale epigones of this meaningful work. As the situation stands, these two elements are currently interpreted as wholly distinct spheres of practice, such that China recognizes Ai Weiwei the artist, Ai Weiwei the blogger, and Ai Weiwei the activist. Coming in the wake of time abroad spent recovering from major surgery, this exhibition represents a step towards this still distant vision of integrated practice, but it will be his continued future action in Beijing that will ultimately lead to a fuller understanding of the interplay between these components.